Krugman on Trump and Economics

At the usual place.

Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong.

Krugman on Katrina, Trump, and the Lessons of Recent History

The things that Krugman says seem pretty obvious, but very few people seem to be saying them.

What we should have learned from Katrina, in other words, was that political poseurs with nothing much to offer besides bluster can nonetheless fool many people into believing that they’re strong leaders. And that’s a lesson we’re learning all over again as the 2016 presidential race unfolds.

You probably think I’m talking about Donald Trump, and I am. But he’s not the only one.

RIP Julian Bond

He was inadvertently responsible for one of the most surreal moments of my life. In the fall of 1996 I was on my way to an 8:00 class at the University of Virginia, wending my way completely alone through the paths behind the buildings on the Lawn, turning corners often, when I suddenly came across another lone figure, dressed in a nicely tailored overcoat and laughing at something said by an unseen person in the Mercedes into which he was leaning. He noticed me and looked a little perturbed. My brain was racing trying to figure out why his face seemed so familiar, when I realized I'd seen it many times before but only when mediated by a TV screen or printed page. I nodded, he relaxed and turned back to the car, and I went on to class. He taught at UVA, so it made sense for him to be there, but wow anyway.

Krugman on Talking Points vs. Reality

Dr K on the things that barely registered at the Republican candidates' debate.

Strange, isn’t it? The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.

And there was a good reason they seemed so tongue-tied: Out there in the real world, none of the disasters their party predicted have actually come to pass. President Obama just keeps failing to fail.

The Non-Grexit

Oh boy. The Guardian sums it up.

Greenhouse on the "Liberal" Supreme Court

Longtime Supreme Court journalist Linda Greenhouse has gradually become one of the sanest of the better-known inside-the-Beltway journalists, bucking the trend to hew to the center-right line and instead actually speaking sense. Here's an example.

The court typically takes cases in order to resolve a conflict among the lower courts, making a grant of review an essentially neutral act from which little can be concluded. Rather, it is cases like King v. Burwell and the Fair Housing Act case that tell the tale. On neither question was there a circuit conflict. Affirming the lower court decisions was a vote for the status quo at least as much as for a “liberal” result. That was especially true in the Fair Housing case. Not only the Fifth Circuit, one of the country’s most conservative courts, but every other circuit had ruled that the Fair Housing Act did not require proof of intentional discrimination. For the Supreme Court to have gone the other way, as most people expected (or else why did the court take the case?) would have manifested right-wing activism in the extreme.

Krugman on the Greek Referendum

The basics.

The truth is that Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding. A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact, given the arithmetic, can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose. The landslide victory of the “no” side offers at least a chance for an escape from this trap.

Krugman on the Supremes and the ACA

Well, here you go.

Now, you might wonder why a law that works so well and does so much good is the object of so much political venom — venom that is, by the way, on full display in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, with its rants against “interpretive jiggery-pokery.” But what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.

Krugman on Derp

It's rat cheer.

“Derp” is a term borrowed from the cartoon “South Park” that has achieved wide currency among people I talk to, because it’s useful shorthand for an all-too-obvious feature of the modern intellectual landscape: people who keep saying the same thing no matter how much evidence accumulates that it’s completely wrong.

The quintessential example is fear mongering over inflation. It was, perhaps, forgivable for economists, pundits, and politicians to warn about runaway inflation some years ago, when the Federal Reserve was just beginning its efforts to help a depressed economy. After all, everyone makes bad predictions now and then.

But making the same wrong prediction year after year, never acknowledging past errors or considering the possibility that you have the wrong model of how the economy works — well, that’s derp.

Krugman on Texas and the Economy

Pointing out the obvious shouldn't create so much controversy. Here's the link.

Belief that tax cuts are a universal elixir that cures all economic ills is the ultimate zombie idea — one that should have died long ago in the face of the facts, but just keeps shambling along. Nothing that has happened in the past quartercentury has supported tax-cut mania, yet the doctrine’s hold on the Republican Party is stronger than ever. It would be foolish to expect recent events to make much difference.

Digby on the Mentally Ill and the Police

Depressing.

The Supreme Court ruled this week that police shooting an agitated schizophrenic woman is justified even if they could have stood outside in a hallway and left her alone in a room until more help arrived. The Justices felt that it was reasonable for them go bursting into the room and shoot her even though they had already been in there, had retreated and knew that she couldn't harm anyone but herself.

Krugman on Vampires

Dr K sez:

The Republicans who came to power this year are...trying to kill Dodd-Frank, the financial reform enacted in 2010.

And why must Dodd-Frank die? Because it’s working.

This statement may surprise progressives who believe that nothing significant has been done to rein in runaway bankers. And it’s true both that reform fell well short of what we really should have done and that it hasn’t yielded obvious, measurable triumphs like the gains in insurance thanks to Obamacare.

But Wall Street hates reform for a reason, and a closer look shows why.

Krugman on Presidential Politics and Integrity

Once again, simply stating the obvious that is rarely stated.

The point is that we’re not just talking about being wrong on specific policy questions. We’re talking about never admitting error, and never revising one’s views. Never being able to say that you were wrong is a serious character flaw even if the consequences of that refusal to admit error fall only on a few people. But moral cowardice should be outright disqualifying in anyone seeking high office.

How Corporate Lobbyists Got That Way

Best summary I've seen.

The evolution of business lobbying from a sparse reactive force into a ubiquitous and increasingly proactive one is among the most important transformations in American politics over the last 40 years.  Probing the history of this transformation reveals that there is no “normal” level of business lobbying in American democracy. Rather, business lobbying has built itself up over time, and the self-reinforcing quality of corporate lobbying has increasingly come to overwhelm every other potentially countervailing force. It has also fundamentally changed how corporations interact with government—rather than trying to keep government out of its business (as they did for a long time), companies are now increasingly bringing government in as a partner, looking to see what the country can do for them.

Krugman on the Blue Recovery

Ah, just read it.

Goodbye Jon

What Digby said.

I'm sure I'll be writing more about the end of the Stewart-Colbert era which I think has been hugely important to liberal politics. But I have always had some reservations about Stewart's "serious" commentary which I'm seeing a whole lot of liberal pundits applaud today as if that's what made him important.  What made him important was that he took the piss out of pundits.

Krugman on Greece and the EU

Here.

Like all too many crises, the new Greek crisis stems, ultimately, from political pandering. It’s the kind of thing that happens when politicians tell voters what they want to hear, make promises that can’t be fulfilled, and then can’t bring themselves to face reality and make the hard choices they’ve been pretending can be avoided.

I am, of course, talking about Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and her colleagues.

Krugman on Economics and the Long Run

Here you go.

We are, after all, still living through the aftermath of a once-in-three-generations financial crisis. America seems, finally, to be recovering — but Bowles-Simpsonism had its greatest influence precisely when the United States economy was still mired in a deep slump. Europe has hardly recovered at all, and there’s overwhelming evidence that austerity policies are the main reason for that ongoing disaster. So why the urge to change the subject to structural reform? The answer, I’d suggest, is intellectual laziness and lack of moral courage.

A Kingdom in the Middle of Petro-Politics

Interesting piece by Josh Marshall on the Saudi ruling family.

Every Saudi head of state who has governed this pivotal, brittle and profoundly influential petro-state during the years of its ascendency since 1953 has been the son of a man born only a decade after the US Civil War....This fact is more than a novelty. As Saudi Arabia became a bigger and bigger force in world affairs this succession principle cast a mortal pall over the regime.

House Squabble

A proposed bill in the House of Representatives that would have banned abortions after twenty weeks was pulled due to Republican infighting. Some sort of wave has crested, it seems. TPM explains.